Heavy Duty People: The Brethren MC Trilogy book 1 (14 page)

‘
OK, I need you to go to the post office for me,’ said Dazza holding out a parcel wrapped in brown paper, ‘Use somewhere discrete.’

‘
Er, sure Dazza,’ said Billy doubtfully, ‘but…’

‘
Just do it,’ Dazza cut across him, ‘and then we’ll talk.’

I
couldn’t help noticing that it had a Glasgow address. That was odd. Who the fuck would Dazza know in Glasgow?

But I knew better than to ask. If it was
Dazza’s business it was Dazza’s business.

6              THE PLAN

Dazza
had asked me over to The Brethren’s pub down by the docks to see him. When I arrived I found him as usual through in his booth in the quiet lounge bar at the back, while his praetorian guard were stood or sat around the pool table in the public bar out front.

Dazza
was talking as I walked through into his inner sanctum. He was in a good mood.

‘
Yeah, just heard the stuff got through safely. I love it when a plan comes together. We’ll need to mix it up of course, different types of packet, different addresses, different post offices or just post boxes would be best I guess. Around here and out of area.’

‘
OK.’

‘
So that’s the next one to go,’ Dazza said gesturing to another parcel on the table.

‘
Where to this time?’ Billy asked.

‘
Wales boyo, not that it’s any concern of yours, and Billy,’ he added as Billy reached for it, ‘Wear some fucking gloves for Chrissakes would ya? D’ya want your dabs all over it you twat?’

Billy looked sheepish at the rebuke.

‘Here,’ said Dazza indicating the empty counter as he stood up, ‘Nick one of the bar towels for now.’

‘
So Damage, welcome to my office again!’ he smiled, extending his hand in greeting, ‘Long time since you’ve been in here eh?’

‘
Yeah,’ I nodded, looking around the otherwise empty room, ‘Not changed much I see,’ I said, noticing the same sewn up ripped seats and even grubbier stained swirly patterned carpet that I had last seen that day five years or so ago after Gyppo’s death. We’d run with and partied with The Brethren many times since but having been out of the business I’d not been back in here since. He met me half way across the room and we bear hugged a greeting. It’s not a fag thing, it’s just we’re brothers. And if you’re really paranoid like we got later it also gives you a bit of a chance to feel if the other guy’s wearing a wire.

We stepped across to the bar where
Billy leant over and began rummaging behind the pumps as Dazza continued to issue instructions, ‘Take a drive. Make sure you can’t be traced.’

The landlord appeared and handed over a couple of bottles and a dry towel before vanishing again back to the public side.
Not that with a room full of patched Brethren playing pool all day, there was a lot of what you might call the general public frequenting the bar on any casual basis.

‘
I’ll hire a car.’

‘
Make sure it’s clean.’

‘
I’ll get a girlfriend to organise it. No sweat.’

Billy always had a string of girlfriends on the go.

‘OK,’ said Dazza turning to me once Billy had disappeared out of the door with a Guinness towel wrapped package under his arm, ‘That’s got him organised at least. Now all we need is more stuff to move.’

We?
More? I wondered.

Beers in hand
Dazza waved me back over to his booth where we slid onto the benches and relaxed.

‘
OK,’ I asked, having taken a swig, ‘So what’s up? I take it this was a business call?’

Dazza
leant back in his seat across the table from me where he could face the door and see anyone who might come in while we were talking, draping his free arm across the back of the bench while his right-hand gripped his bottle of beer on the table.

‘
What?’ he exclaimed in mock disbelief, ‘You mean to say that you don’t think I’d just ask you over for a drink and a bit of fun? I’m truly, truly hurt.’

I laughed
at his wounded expression and took another pull on my bottle. He cracked me up sometimes.

‘
Come on Dazza, pull the other one! It’s me here not some fucking newbie. Don’t forget I know you mate!’

He gave a wry smile.
‘Yeah you’re right, you got me. It’s business. Now that it’s over it’s time to get to work.’

I shrugged back
, ‘Don’t expect anything else mate after all these years. Anyway, what can I do for you?’

‘
D’ya remember that chat we had when you were laid up? You know, when you were in hospital.’

‘
What about it?’

‘
And what I wanted you to do for me?’

‘
Yeah.’

‘
Well, I need to talk to you about getting that going.’

‘
OK,’ I shrugged, ‘So what do you want me to do?’

‘
I need you to handle some money for me.’

‘
Clean or dirty?’

‘
Dirty.’

‘
OK,’ I made a show of thinking about it, ‘Well it could be difficult, but I’ve got some ideas.’

‘
I don’t care how you do it so long as it works.’

‘
So how much are we talking about?’

‘
If things work out right, a fuck of a lot.’

‘
Thousands?’

‘
And more if we keep our shit together.’

‘
Cash cash, or just money?’

‘
What d’ya mean “just money”?’

‘
Bank transfers, cheques, that sort of thing, as opposed to real cash, notes and coins.’

He thought about this for a moment.
‘Mostly money I guess, rather than cash then although there could be some of that as well.’

‘
Lumpy or steady streams?’

‘
Mostly lumps, although we might set some up as regular payments in on the drip.’

I nodded and put my empty beer bottle down on the table.

‘OK, I’ll see what I can do. I might need some seed money first though to set it up.’

‘
Much?’

‘
Nah. A few hundred I guess in the first instance, if that. Certainly no more than a grand.’

‘
That’s no problem. I can stake that easy.’

‘
It’ll also cost you though,’ I warned him, ‘banks and stuff. They’ll all want to take their cut on moving money around. You won’t get back everything you put in by the time it’s been round the system enough times. Are you up for that?’

‘
Well it’s a cost of doing business I guess. Just try and keep it to a minimum will ya?’

‘
Sure, don’t want no fucking bankers making a mint on your dosh do we?’

‘
No we fucking don’t!’

Given what he
’d said before, what he was asking didn’t come as a complete surprise other than that he seemed to be expecting to be handling some big numbers. To tell the truth I’d been giving it some thought ever since our first conversation back in the hospital, so I had some ideas already.

There were three problems as I saw it
which basically were in, fuck it all about and out.

Firstly there was getting money into the banking
system in a way that didn’t arouse suspicion. For that I would need to open bank accounts, and the more of them the better, so that whatever was coming in could be spread around, and ideally those where money coming in wouldn’t arouse suspicion. They could be a mixture of types. If I had some in the names of individuals, if we had some cash coming regularly on a monthly basis, that could be made to look like salaries going in. Then if I arranged some business accounts as well, lumpier receipts would just look like customers paying their bills. If we were going to be dealing with some real cash, then having some business accounts that you expect to have cash bankings, like a shop, a pub or even better a bookies, would be a good idea to cover this sort of stuff coming in.

But I had
to come up with a way to get this organised whist minimising my tracks.

‘
So speaking of costs, what’s in it for me?’

‘
Sure, we all gotta eat, I know that. I was thinking a percentage of what comes back clean?’

That made sense. It incentivised me to make it happen at
the least cost.

‘
OK, that works for me in principle. So how much are we talking?’

‘
Ten percent to make it worth your while?’

I nodded.

‘But it’s on one condition,’ he said.

‘
Which is?’

‘
If you do this then you’re the banker, which means that you need to be clean. So I don’t want your hands in anything dirty.’

‘
That’s OK by me.’

‘
I guessed it would be, it’s one of the reasons I asked you. So do we have a deal?’

‘
OK brother,’ we shook on it like real businessmen, ‘you’re on.’

*

This was where my IFA business came in handy.

The following week with some of
Dazza’s seed cash I arranged to rent a flat in town in the name of one of my clients. Then as the new tenant, I called up the water board, the electric, the gas and the phone company and arranged supplies, only each time I called I used the names of a different client from whom I already had a signed authorisation to act on their behalf. So now I had an address with five different clients that I could soon prove lived there and I could go to work.

Dressed in my suit I went into
five different banks across town that Friday and filled out application forms for accounts on behalf of my clients. Obviously I had their letter of authorisation to act on their behalf and from my records I had their prior address history where the bank forms wanted that. Since I was an IFA advising on mortgages and stuff no one in any of the banks ever thought it was odd that the clients that I was opening an account for had a different address from the one that was on my letter of authority. And when anyone did ask I just explained that this was their new place for which I had organised a mortgage.

And so by close of play on Friday I had ten accounts in the process of being opened, since each of my clients needed a deposit account as well as a current account.
And of course they might then need accounts at another bank as well.

It worked beautifully.

Even later, when opening bank accounts became a bit more difficult with all the money laundering identification crap, the system still worked. Again with my IFA business, every time I advised somebody I had to collect all the know your client crap anyway, which included photocopies of passports as proof of ID, as well as photocopies of utility bills as proof of address.

So with the letter of authorisation that my clients signed to allow me to work on their behalf, opening some new bank accounts was still relatively simple. I continued to spread it around of course. Many of the local bankers were used to dealing with me, after all, I
’d been doing this stuff for clients for years. I was also an IFA, so they were happy to trust photocopies of ID documentation where I had certified them as having seen the originals, they knew that customers wanted to hold onto their passports for obvious reasons. So a certified copy was fine, particularly when backed up by an original utility bill as proof of address.

Later on
, I also started to ring the changes every so often, having Mr Bloggs move out, to allow Mr Smith to take over the lease so I could get even more people out of the same address. Of course I didn’t want to do it too often, but as it grew I was ending up with around half a dozen names registered over time at each flat, which gave plenty of scope to open multiple accounts. You just had to do the maths and multiply it by the number of flats we had on the go to see how many accounts I had to play with.

I
could actually have done more, I could have photocopied utility statements and overprinted them with new names to get more out of each flat, but the mix of photocopied passport and real utility bills was working well so why risk it by some cheap forgery? I could open enough accounts as it was and could always carry on doing so if we needed to. Besides, pretty soon Dazza was looking to get into property in a big way so eventually we became our own landlords, which was useful as it then started to give Dazza a legitimate source of income.

The same thing applied to companies. I
bought them off-the-shelf, appointing Mr Bloggs and Mr Smith as directors and used one of our flats as the registered office. Then it was simple to open business bank accounts, and again once the money laundering regulations and the need for know your client identification documentation came in, I could use the same stuff used to open their personal accounts to vouch for their existence as directors and shareholders.